The Myth of Israeli Manipulation and the Shared Sin of Empire
Thou Shalt Not…
The ninth commandment is short but its reach is long. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour (Exodus 20:16) forbids not merely the perjury of the courtroom but every convenient falsehood a man repeats because it flatters his tribe and quiets his conscience. It is worth beginning here, because the account of American foreign policy most beloved by a certain kind of dissenter, the claim that a small foreign nation and its domestic partisans have hijacked the mightiest state on earth and bent it, against its own interests, toward ends not its own, is a false witness twice over. It is false as history. And it is faithless as theology, for it performs the oldest and most seductive trick of a guilty people: it finds a stranger to carry the sin out into the wilderness.
I hold no brief for the American empire. I have never published a kind word for the warfare state, the tribute economy of foreign aid, or the sacraments of blood by which nations consecrate their power. But precisely because we reject the empire, we must reject the lie that lets it off the hook. Israel does not manipulate the United States. Israel is the United States’ partner, a willing, capable, and richly rewarded partner in a shared ambition for the mastery of a single strategic region. The two are not puppet and puppeteer. They are yoked oxen, pulling the same plough.
The Verdict of 1967
Norman Finkelstein, no friend of the Israeli state, and a man who has paid dearly for his candor, supplies the historian’s correction. In The Holocaust Industry (2000), he observes what the mythology obscures: before June of 1967, Israel was a marginal concern in Washington’s strategic imagination. Successive administrations balanced their patronage between Arab elites and Israelis, and the organized American Jewish community, anxious above all about the “dual loyalty” slander, eager for a seat at the American table, kept a careful distance from Zionist enthusiasm. Israel was one regional asset among several, and hardly the favored one.
The Six-Day War rewrote the ledger. In under a week, Israel dismantled the Soviet-armed forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and in doing so demonstrated something Washington prized far above sympathy: competence. Here was a client that could win. Finkelstein’s formulation is exact; it was not Israel’s weakness or its isolation but its proven strength and its usefulness to American power that transformed its standing. The tail did not wag the dog. The dog, appraising a formidable new hound, resolved to hunt alongside it.
Into the Power Structure, Not Against It
The second half of Finkelstein’s argument is the one most fatal to the manipulation thesis, and the one most often ignored. He describes the postwar American Jewish establishment as a community pursuing assimilation and access, organizations such as the American Jewish Committee understanding, correctly, that their interest lay in proximity to elite American power, not in opposition to it. Before 1967 that logic counseled restraint. After 1967, when to embrace a victorious Israel was to embrace American strategic policy, the logic reversed: one could now be ardently pro-Israel and ardently pro-American in a single breath.
Read this carefully, for it inverts the conspiracy entirely. The postwar embrace of Israel was not the story of a foreign loyalty subverting American power. It was the story of a minority folding its aspirations into American power, aligning with the empire, not capturing it. Zeal for Israel swelled precisely because, and precisely when, Israel had become an instrument of the United States. To call this manipulation is to read the arrow backward.
Symbiosis, Not Subversion
Noam Chomsky drew the same map a generation ago. In The Fateful Triangle (1983), he documented at exhausting length that the United States sustains Israel neither from sentiment nor from any hijacking of its will, but because a militarized Israel performs concrete imperial functions: policing a strategically vital and oil-rich region, deterring nationalist and Soviet-aligned movements, absorbing and field-testing American weaponry, and projecting force where American troops would be politically ruinous. Israel is, in the admiring language of the empire’s own strategists, an unsinkable aircraft carrier that America need not crew.
When Mearsheimer and Walt published The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), arguing that American support could not be explained on strategic or moral grounds and must therefore be laid at the feet of a lobby steering policy against the national interest, Finkelstein answered them directly. The framing, he replied, is a false choice. Both American and Israeli elites have long agreed that the Arab world must be kept subordinate; where the appetites of two powers already converge, one need not posit a hijacking. The lobby amplifies and lubricates a policy the empire already wants. It does not author it. And this is the whole difference between a partner and a puppeteer: a partner presses on a door already open.
None of this exonerates either party. Symbiosis is not innocence. The occupation is real, the dispossession is real, the wars are real, and the corpses are not metaphors. But the guilt is shared, shared roughly in proportion to power, which means the larger share belongs to the larger nation. That is exactly the conclusion the manipulation thesis is built to avoid.
That the U.S. tolerates, and supports Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, and the furtherance of the Greater Israel project is simply the price that the U.S. pays for the services of a compliant imperial asset. This is the same phenomenon repeated incessantly when the U.S. turns its back on a compliant state’s abysmal human rights record. The Shah’s Iran, Somoza’s Nicaragua, Marcos’ Philippines serve as examples.
Why the Lie Is Antisemitic, and Why That Should Trouble Its Own Critics
Here the history and the theology meet. The image at the heart of the manipulation thesis, a small cabal of Jews covertly steering a great Gentile nation to its ruin, against its own true interest, is not a neutral hypothesis that merely happens to concern Jews. It is the precise architecture of the oldest antisemitic libel; the Protocols of the Elders of Zion refitted in the vocabulary of foreign-policy realism. The scholar Joseph Massad named the discomfort plainly: there is something too familiar in blaming a supposedly rich and powerful group of Jews for the whole drift of a nation’s policy.
And this libel, like every act of scapegoating, is useful. It is useful to the empire, which would far rather be thought the dupe of a clever foreign agent than the author of its own aggressions. It is useful to Israel’s defenders, who may wave away every substantive criticism of the occupation as a recrudescence of the ancient hatred, and when critics oblige by trafficking in puppet-master imagery, the defense writes itself. So, the manipulation thesis achieves the reverse of what its adopters intend. Meaning to indict, it insulates. It issues both Washington and Jerusalem an alibi: the one pleads seduction, the other pleads bigotry, and the shared labor of empire proceeds unexamined behind their quarrel.
The Scapegoat and the Sword
Scripture named this mechanism long before the modern age diagrammed it. On the Day of Atonement, the congregation laid its sins upon the head of a goat and drove the creature into the wilderness (Leviticus 16), and for a moment the people felt clean. But the goat bore away no sin at all. It bore away only the feeling of sin and left the sinning intact. The manipulation thesis is a scapegoat rite for the American conscience. Load the transgressions of empire, the coups, the sanctions, the bombardment of the poor, upon a foreign nation and its domestic kinsmen, drive them out into the discourse, and the citizen may go on believing his country good at heart, merely misled.
The Christian who has laid down the sword cannot join this rite, for two reasons. The first is the ninth commandment: it is a lie, and no cause is served by a lie, least of all a righteous one. The second cuts deeper. The peacemaker’s entire witness is that the sword is sin, not the sword in a stranger’s hand, but the sword as such, including and especially the sword the United States wields in its own name. To blame Israel for American militarism is to concede the very premise the peacemaker denies: that the violence would be tolerable if only it served our interest rather than theirs. It would not. You cannot serve God and mammon (Matthew 6:24), and the warfare state is mammon under arms. Its idolatry is not imported. It is homegrown, and it must be repented at home.
Repentance requires an honest accounting, and honesty here is not ambiguous. Two nations, each grasping after dominion, found in one another a useful confederate and struck a covenant of mutual advantage. Neither was tricked. Both knew what they wanted; both have largely gotten it; and the bill has been settled in other people’s blood. That is a harder saying than the myth of manipulation, because it leaves no stranger to drive into the wilderness and no comfort but the one the Gospel actually extends: not a villain to blame, but a sin to forsake.
Praise Be to God
